The U.S. voted this week to usher in a second presidency for Donald Trump, who won by a significant margin despite polls and mainstream media pundits saying the election would be “too close to call.” 

Fascism is here because neoliberalism and capitalism opened the door to it.

When President Joe Biden was elected four years ago, it was in response to an overtly fascist and racist Trump. We had a raging pandemic and anti-science disinformation fomenting death and despair. The Democrats had their perfect villain in Trump, someone despicable, unpredictable, and who successfully tore away at the fabric and processes that hold Washington, D.C., together. There’s an order and system in place for the functioning of our government, and Trump severely altered it so that liberals could be galvanized into voting for Biden—someone who worked with segregationists and was instrumental in the devastating 1994 Crime Bill. 

As people mourn Trump’s win this week, Democrats have themselves to blame for ushering fascism by way of genocide. Democrats normalized white supremacy and made constant concessions to the very people they said we needed to save democracy from. After the white supremacist uprising that was the Jan. 6 insurrection encouraged by Trump’s stochastic terrorism, one would hope that the U.S. would reckon with how white supremacy is interwoven and embedded into the country’s very structure. Instead, the liberal voting block stopped caring about migrants and asylum-seekers, trans kids, and Black and brown people most deeply affected by a tanking economy and threats to their rights and lives. 

We saw a pushback against diversity and equity initiatives (which were a corporate Band-Aid on a broken arm) and a massive influx of COVID-19-designated funding for police across the country. And, of course, Biden will be remembered as “Genocide Joe,” a president who helped fund the Israeli genocide of Palestinians in Gaza, its invasion of Lebanon, the bombing of Iran, Syria, and Yemen, and increased settler and military violence and killings of Palestinians in the West Bank. While the official death count in Gaza is at more than 43,000 since last October, several estimates put the deaths in the hundreds of thousands. 

Rather than meet the overwhelming favor for an arms embargo on Israel and address the needs of millions of people across the U.S., the Democrats shifted further and further right. The Democratic National Committee thought Vice President Kamala Harris could run without being nominated by an electorate (and as a candidate who polled in single digits during her first run for Democratic nominee). They hired Gen-Z social media strategists who made election posts tapping into pop-culture zeitgeist and almost made Charli XCX’s Brat album uncool by punching that meme into the ground. Harris ran on “joy” and “vibes” for weeks until people demanded actual policy proposals. 

Harris promised no change or deviation from the sitting president to a country desperate for change. And Harris moved hard right on immigration and stumped with Liz Cheney and crowed about war criminal Dick Cheney’s endorsement. She stood by the U.S.-backed Israeli genocide of Palestinians, promised more of the same, and told anti-genocide protestors at her rallies to shut up because she wasn’t “done speaking.” 

What this feels like is the death rattle of U.S. hegemony, and it must come to an end for our survival. 

Why aren’t the liberals who are mourning Harris’ loss also mourning Palestinians wiped from the face of the planet? Why couldn’t they hear echoes of their children’s voices when 6-year-old Hind Rajab desperately pleaded for safety from Israeli gunfire? Why didn’t they demand an arms embargo as the condition for their votes? Why didn’t they push her because she was and is in office? But we know why. The dehumanization of Arabs in the Western mind is so thorough that entire Palestinian families killed and ended by American bombs are justifiable as long as American families remain superficially comfortable in their cognitive dissonance and soothe themselves with the idea of a “lesser evil.” They had to step over the bodies of Palestinian women to vote for a woman president.

In failing to grapple with white supremacist violence that ushered in Trump in 2016 and by focusing purely on identity politics instead of dismantling racial capitalism, carcerality, and settler-colonialism, we sit here at this moment—where an imperialist power has met both its apex and its demise. What this feels like is the death rattle of U.S. hegemony, and it must come to an end for our survival. 
We will never vote our way out of fascism—what it will take to get out of this is nothing short of a revolution and a commitment to liberation for all. The two-party system is not a democracy; we need actual power for the poor, working class, and people willing to shed the American notion of individualism in favor of collectivism, as Prism columnist William Anderson recently wrote. We can find ourselves out of this through struggle, deep political education, boundless, beautiful imagination for something better, and a commitment to care for the most marginalized. 

If you are newly radicalized this year and looking for grounding and a place to start, I recommend this piece by our friends at Waging Nonviolence. If you are radicalized by what you are witnessing in Palestine, I recommend that you find us and our colleagues across movement publications at Media Against Apartheid & Displacement. As June Jordan succinctly said, “Palestine is the litmus test for the world.” It is our moral, human duty to report what is happening in Palestine and the repression we face for our organizing at home. It should drive you to action, but let your political education begin with sources you can trust. As Prism’s editor-in-chief, I am responsible for ensuring that you will find all of that here. We are movement journalists and will continue to hold power to account no matter who is in office. Another way is possible.